George Packer's Blog, page 164

The Haunting Normalcy of Mass Shootings

October 1st will mark a year since a young man shot and killed eight fellow-students and a professor at Umpqua Community College, in Roseburg, Oregon. I learned about the unfolding events as we so often do these days—on social media. Over the next two days, I witnessed the cyclical conversation that seems to happen every time a mass shooting occurs. The first reaction is shock and horror, followed quickly by demands and pleas that something be done. Not long after, the finger-pointing begins. The conversation reaches a fever pitch and then, silence—until the next mass shooting takes place.

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Related:
The Reductive Narrative Tactics of “Author: The JT LeRoy Story”
“Cameraperson” and the Conventions of Documentary Filmmaking
Baton Rouge and a Reservoir of Wrongs

Does Donald Trump Pay Any Income Taxes at All?

The Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold is rightly getting a lot of attention for his stellar reporting on Donald Trump’s charitable giving, or the lack thereof. Fahrenthold and his colleagues have spent more than six months contacting hundreds of charities that Trump claims to have given money to through his family charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump and the Truth: The Interest-Rate Flip-Flop
Mike Pence and the Meaning of “Deplorable”
Morning Cartoon: Wednesday, September 14th

Colin Kaepernick and a Landmark Supreme Court Case

The decision by Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, first to sit and then to kneel, rather than stand, during the national anthem before his team’s games has set off a national debate. The 49ers grudgingly supported his right to protest against the ritual, and other players have now joined him, while some politicians, like Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, have denounced the defiant, if silent, gestures. The best answer to the anthem conundrum, however, can be found in the most eloquent opinion in the history of the Supreme Court.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, August 31st
Colin Kaepernick and the Radical Uses of “The Star-Spangled Banner”
Brexit, Seen from the Top of Europe

Late and Later

Noah Syndergaard, his sinkers and sliders coiling like mambas around the ankles of the Nationals’ batters, struck out ten last night and left the game, in Washington, with a 3–1 lead, which vanished in the bottom of the ninth on three hits—two of them infield squigglers—and a throwing error, all against the reliable closer Jeurys Familia.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Morning Cartoon: Tuesday, September 6th
The Women Succeeding in a Men’s Professional Baseball League
Promotion and Giveaway Ideas That Any Minor-League Baseball Team Is Free to Use

The House Science Committee’s Anti-Science Rampage

If you know the answers you want in advance, you can always find them by cherry-picking your data. That’s what climate-change deniers have tried to do in recent years in arguing that there’s been a “pause” in the global-warming trend over the past two decades—suggesting, thereby, that global warming is just a temporary anomaly unrelated to human industrial activity. Last year, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put the “climate change hiatus” myth to bed. They published a paper in Science that showed, using new and more definitive data, that the claimed “pause” hadn’t taken place.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Anti-Science Campaign
Space, Climate Change, and the Real Meaning of Theory
Are Conservationists Worrying Too Much About Climate Change?

Mike Pence and the Meaning of “Deplorable”

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, this is the definition of the word “deplorable”: “very bad in a way that causes shock, fear, or disgust : deserving to be deplored.” If there is any public figure in America who fits that definition, it is surely David Duke. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist individuals and groups, describes Duke as “the most recognizable figure of the American radical right, a neo-Nazi, longtime Klan leader and now international spokesman for Holocaust denial.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Getting Hillary Clinton to Talk About Her Health
Twenty Science Questions for Donald Trump
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, September 13th

Two Connecticut School Systems, for the Rich and Poor

For close to half a century, the aim of scores of lawsuits about public schools across the country has been to require states to improve education for students by spending a lot more money. When the case of Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding v. M. Jodi Rell began, in 2005, that was its goal, too. Last week, after sixty days of a bench trial, Judge Thomas G. Moukawsher, of the Connecticut Superior Court, said that the judiciary cannot set the amount of money the state must spend on education. In a smartly written, sometimes sardonic, and unusually pointed ninety-page opinion, he focussed instead on how the state is spending the billions of dollars it does on education and concluded that it is failing miserably.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Power of Pell Grants for Prisoners
The Limits of “Grit”
Teaching Anti-Extremism in Kenya

Getting Hillary Clinton to Talk About Her Health

The cover of this week’s National Enquirer announced that the publication was in possession of “Hillary’s Full Medical File,” showing her supposed history of “Three Strokes, Alzheimer’s, Liver Damage from Booze,” and, just for good measure, “Violent Rages.” The Enquirer had apparently done up an ashen-faced photo of Clinton to make her look like a ghostly opossum. In tone (screeching panic) and substance (scattershot assemblage of dire medical conditions), the Enquirer’s take was a lot like the right-wing conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health that had been gaining traction this summer; that tone and substance made them easy to dismiss, as I did a couple of weeks ago. The Enquirer is a fitting vehicle for Clinton-health hysteria—Donald Trump has singled it out as one of the only media sources he finds credible (he wondered recently why it hadn’t won a Pulitzer), and its editors took time off from covering celebrity autopsies and what it claimed was the Obama family’s cocaine-crazed lifestyle to endorse Trump this spring.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Twenty Science Questions for Donald Trump
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, September 13th
Trump and the Truth: Conspiracy Theories

Good News! We’re as Rich as We Were in 1998

Even for an economist, Larry Mishel is famously grumpy. “I’m a glass-half-empty guy,” he told me. He is the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank devoted to analyzing and improving the economic lives of poor, working, and middle-class Americans. Which is to say, in his hundreds of academic papers, blog posts, and interviews, “I haven’t written anything about the U.S. economy this positive in many years. Probably since the late nineties. That was the last time there was really good, across-the-board income and wage growth.” Until today. At 11:03 this morning, shortly after the Census Bureau released its annual report on household income in the U.S., he tweeted, “I can’t remember feeling such glee on seeing a new economics data report.” He then spent forty-three minutes reading more details of the data and tweeted, at 11:46 A.M., “I’m especially thrilled at the fast growth at the bottom. WOW,” and linked to a chart showing that the poorest ten per cent of Americans had experienced the most growth, seeing their cumulative earnings rise by 7.9 per cent in 2015. Nearly a million fewer Americans were reported as living under the poverty threshold. There was a steady flow of happy tweets throughout the day, filled with words Mishel isn’t used to typing, like “superb” and “great.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the High Cost of Big-City Living Is Bad for Everyone
The Hole in Obama’s Legacy
The Trouble with Owning a Grain Elevator

North Carolina Republicans vs. N.C.A.A. Basketball

On Monday night, the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced that, in response to North Carolina’s controversial anti-transgender law, it would relocate all championship games that were scheduled to be held in the state this academic year. “Fairness is about more than the opportunity to participate in college sports,” Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, wrote in a statement accompanying the decision. “We believe in providing a safe and respectful environment at our events.” Emmert’s clear implication was that the North Carolina law known as House Bill 2, which nullifies local civil-rights ordinances protecting trans people and assigns people to public bathrooms based on their “biological sex,” makes the state a hostile environment. In its decision not to hold national events in North Carolina, the N.C.A.A. joins the N.B.A., which announced in July that it would move its All-Star Game out of Charlotte.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Southern Trouble for Donald Trump?
Comment from the June 6 & 13, 2016, Issue
The Transgender Bathroom Debate and the Looming Title IX Crisis